Your Sunday Brunch Special: Mormon Free Will as Primary or Emergent in History as a Superposition of the King Follett Sermon and Polygamy

Free will is often confused with what Latter-day Saints have traditionally named Free Agency (and later emphasis: Moral Agency). There is a background.

In Joseph Smith’s (JS) teaching after 1838 there is a clear notion of uncreated souls=spirits=minds. This is represented in Mormon literature after 1890 by JS’s King Follett Sermon (KFS)—a name externally attached to JS’s April 7, 1844 sermon after a relatively short time, at least by the 1850s. In KFS, Souls are not created and exist in some way as permanent beings that can have no end because they have no beginning. KFS is the historical representative of this idea because it was the most frequently published of JS’s sermons through time. Which KFS, is a legitimate question because there are many versions. That is for another time perhaps.

How does polygamy play into the idea of Free Will? It does it by means of emergent souls. In simplified terms, the answer extends back to early revelations (Joseph Smith Translation and some other early documents) and the rationalization of polygamy by one of its most difficult children, Orson Pratt (I mean that metaphorically, Pratt was sharply shaped by polygamy). Why polygamy? If Pratt was going to accept polygamy as divine order, there had to be reasons–theological–cosmological reasons–and those reasons could not rest on whether JS was some sort of fool for his lusts. Pratt was an important voice there. If he was going to accept JS as the voice of God in modern times, he needed a rationale for polygamy and beginning near the time of JS’s death and becoming more detailed and definite with time, Pratt’s ideas formed a partial basis for official belief. His logic was that polygamy was vital to the Mormon Project and it represented the combination of several religious threads in (1) common antebellum social thought (gender roles) and (2) the early Mormon idea that God created spirits, and (3) the Mormon heaven was a material image of the human world on earth. This meant that creating spirits, which are in any Mormon theology “children” of God, required something radical. Adopted souls for JS (“children” of God), were transformed into begotten souls (“children” of God via reproduction) for Pratt (not just Pratt of course–Eliza Snow and Brigham Young had somewhat different versions but in essence the same). Pratt was very literal about his idea of begotten: spirits were the result of sexual intercourse between God and his wives. And so, God *needed* wives, plural wives, because, Pratt argued, spirit gestation took time (maybe not a heavenly 9 months but still, time). And God needed to make spirits fast. Pratt worked out that spirits had to be the result of exalted sex, not physical babies, via 1 Cor 15—co-passenger reasoning from the idea that the resurrected had no blood. The resurrected were solely animated by Spirit (sometimes it was supposed to be a fluid that circulated in the bloodless veins–interesting problems there) and hence their offspring would be spirits. (I’m not arguing for the reasoning here, just reporting). The more spirits you make, the greater your glory to put it in frank terms and thus the greater your familial joy—hence lots of wives is a real boon in Pratt’s very earth-like heaven. For Young, who took things in a somewhat different direction (God-Adam/Eve made human physical bodies too, to do it, he/she just ate a lot of fruit in the Garden of Eden and so “charged” himself with a lot of physical stuff and so was able to produced physical offspring on earth by sex again), the Process was the eternal thing, not the individual spirits. By the twentieth century, Mormons like James Talmage identified the emergent minds in heaven as parent-derived. Their eternity was inherited through an infinite regress of Gods (Pratt didn’t like that part of it but Young did).

Even outside observers compiling encyclopedias of religion noted the contrast between Pratt, Snow, Young, etc. and JS and careful readers on the inside saw the same thing. No one likes to think their beliefs harbor contradictions or inconsistencies even if they take place via evolutionary means over time. Age of Reason and all that. By 1912 the church’s First Presidency (Joseph F. Smith, Anthon H. Lund, Charles W. Penrose) decided to suppress KFS and banned it from church literature for, among other reasons, it’s teaching about souls. When those three men died, KFS made its return. But it made a return in the context of spirits born in heaven. The logic of reconciliation of the ontology of KFS with that of Young, Snow, and co. had two fronts. I’ll mention one below. The rest may be for another post. Or, you can read the book.

Emergent souls, whatever the details, had two evolving links to the social landscape and the world of science. One, was a consequence of sexuality, the other a consequence of a branch of materialism. The first emerged(!) from the implication of sexual reproduction in heaven. Offspring must be sexed themselves–male and female. The spirit offspring were male and female–that was the perfect world of heaven, the normative nature of sexuality as seen from the pinnacle of the Temple was two and only two sided. That made deviations from that norm the result of the fallen world of mortality–what else could it be? This is a way to see Jesus in all this (fall, atonement). The point of sex on earth was reproduction and that was its point in heaven. Boyd K. Packer: would GOD confuse your gender? Must be the devil. Alternatives need not apply. You can see the reluctance of church leaders to believe in a material predisposition to some other sexuality. Hence in the church’s 1995 The Family: A Proclamation to the World, church leaders could announce that spirit genders were fixed and eternal. And thus there could never be a permanent place for alternative sexualities in doctrine. Sealing heterosexual couples made for more Gods in heaven and the more spirits by reproduction (sorry folks but the boat of polygamy enhancement of glory has sailed but its theology remains).

In today’s science, the world is not divided up in two ways, but it’s pretty much a done deal in the case of mind. Minds emerge from the complexities of Brain and Brain emerged out of evolution. The end point, if not the evolutionary logic, had perfect correlation with Young, Pratt, etc. Children of God and Mother(s?) have Minds that emerge out of being born in heaven, in just the same way as it does in human babies. It’s the Analogy, brothers and sisters. And that makes evolution problematic. Very problematic. It’s what Joseph F. Smith was feeling in 1909 (and made clear in another official statement, this time about evolution). Consciousness falls into this debate somewhere but let us not confuse things with arguments about that and intelligence. For science, the mind/consciousness emerges from the brain which emerged out of the dark genesis of evolutionary process–there are various opinions about what this means but that’s another long road. For the Proclamation, mind emerged in heaven the way it does in babies on earth except its a divine gift maybe. The Free Will of the post title comes into play by three methodologies (not going to define Free Will here). In science there is some division. Free Will may emerge with consciousness or it may be an illusion of consciousness. Second, in Mormonism, Free Will is some kind of gift of God that comes with one’s spirit being born via sex in heaven (confusing Free Will with Agency gets you this, for example)–you can hear Eliza singing in the background about her first “primeval childhood” or, sex—->birth on earth, depending on the brand of Mormonism or the timeline. Third, Free Will is just a property of eternal souls. Just there. It has no beginning, no end. Take your pick, or don’t. You decide.

Now, how about KFS? Joseph F. Smith and his counselors were brought up with the logic and cosmology of polygamy: there was sexual reproduction in heaven that generated the spirits, souls, minds, of humankind. This was a major point (among others) that saw KFS as just wrong. You had to say that carefully of course. When KFS returned to favor in the 1930s, it brought some baggage but thirty years before, some of it had been reconciled with the ontology of polygamy by church thinkers like general authority Seventy, B. H. Roberts. Roberts and a group of others in the same school were the worker bees here. It went like this. For JS to be right, there must be a way that minds are not emergent. But how do you get spirit babies then? You postulate another analogy: on earth, spirits get entangled with bodies at birth and hence minds are imported (are there TWO minds?). The emergent part is just smoke and mirrors, it’s developmental meaning it’s just clearing the fog. How about the heavenly family then. Sure spirits still are born in heaven, but their minds come about via minds getting entangled with spirits. It’s Analogy, baby! This dual argument saves some of JS’s claims and it saves polygamy’s Utah theology at the same time. Minds just precede spirits. But then there are a host of questions that make things complicated. Something the First Presidency of 1912 could see via letters coming in from Saints who read church manuals. That is a whole other story.

JS creates problems with his idea of eternal spirits. Though he doesn’t seem to want to do it, a consequence of his claims is that spirits are transcendent. He wants “spirit” to be on the order of the material world. But he was working with a worldview that was conditioned by his environment. A hundred years after his death, the universe was no longer seen as fixed and permanent. It’s dynamic and decaying, spreading out, fading. Material has become a recipe for disorder and death. So a literal flesh and bones (no blood!) God is problematic. Protons (probably) decay over eons. Atoms dissolve. God must be pushed back into a transcendent world and so are JS’s souls. It’s wonderfully complicated over against JS’s desire to simplify with everything being “material” and thus “real.” Matter is not easy. And it’s mostly empty space anyway. And I’m heading off to church.